No sign on the status page. But two separate / unrelated accounts I know about are fully down right now. Data services / backend workers seem fine, web/routing layer seems to be dead.
We use nano banana extensively to build video storyboards, which we then turn into full motion video with a combination of img2vid models. It sounds like we're doing similar things, trying to keep images/characters/setting/style consistent across ~dozens of images (~minutes of video). You might like the product depending on what you're doing with the outputs! https://hypernatural.ai
I use useEffect the same way and suffer the same grievances. I think it's because useEffect is intended as a way to keep references/state synced, not trigger downstream logic on various interactions. But there's only one useEffect, so it does all the things.
Image editing/compositing/remixing is not quite as good as gpt-image-1, but the results are really compelling anyway due to the dramatic increase in speed! Playing with it just now, it's often 5 seconds for a compositing task between multiple images. Feels totally different from waiting 30s+ for gpt-image-1.
There are so many challenges with building a social app, especially around contacts... I'm not sure how they'll mitigate all this stuff, but fun to think about it and hope they do succeed in doing so anyway.
A few considerations off the top of my head:
- relationships are extremely fragile and can exist in all sorts of awkward middle states, outside of just "friend enough to notify when I'm in town" vs not. the risk of creating awkward meatspace side effects is extremely high with this kind of thing, with very large downside risk that human beings are very attuned to. for example: exes, former bosses or colleagues gone sideways, people you said something weird to once at a party, stalkers, etc. are all people you might have in your contacts
- relatedly, contacts growing out of sync organically over time is actually a feature, not a bug. it's easy to let contacts die when they die by themselves without having to prune them -- and nobody's delicate feelings get hurt by letting this happen
- existing on a mobile phone while not being an attention-sucking nightmare cesspool -- while also not /creating/ another attention-sucking cesspool, despite having all the social data necessary to do so -- seems like an impossible challenge. how do you get people to remember your little app in a sea of Trending Flamebait notifications? (others have noted this related to funding model, but that part feels surmountable, especially as a passion project from a billionaire)
Anecdotal, but my neighborhood police chief (Ingleside) recently shared that thefts are down across the board in her reporting area. Seems backed up by aggregate reports: https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/san-francisco-crim... (She attributed it to the plainclothes retail ops they've been doing leading to significant arrests, and the DA prosecuting a bunch of theft over the past year)
A better title for this website might be "Where are crimes reported in SF?" -- it does not help us understand or contextualize how "safe" SF is overall compared to anything else, or even understand the types of crimes reported and whether that impacts your personal safety.
Too many nontechnical folks I talk to act like they’re blocked because they don't have a technical cofounder to build their amazing app idea. But there’s so much they can do to build a business with no code with today’s tools! Technical folks will be impressed by how far you’ve gotten without having any actual custom software. I tried to capture this here: https://medium.com/@taylorhughes/to-find-a-technical-cofound...
I appreciate the honest description of what it feels like to do something where nobody cares. With all the glamour surrounding successful startups, it’s easy to think your journey will feel like a movie montage followed by rewards relatively quickly. In reality it’s usually lonely and quiet, and you have to figure out how to keep yourself going to build something meaningful.
Also it sounds like there is a need to be more aggressive with managing your calendar. At some point you have to organize your time into blocks where you can actually do work and manage when you are in "teaching mode".
This plus do not get overly distracted by the ones who can’t figure it out on their own after some basic guidance. Identify the juniors who do well, and leverage them to help drive your / the org’s goals. They will get promoted and you will hit your goals faster. It’s a balance though because you have to carve out your own time too.
It’s fairly small, built by a team of 3 over the course of a few years. Probably less than 100 endpoints. Good coverage for the core, not for the rest. (Eg, zero tests for the main way the app makes money, photo books. )
Note that this is due to legal requirements around discovering a user's age in a "neutral" way, in order to block under-13 users (or varying other ages depending on global jurisdiction). This is called a "neutral age screen". The screen cannot indicate that there will be a lockout, or underage users would just say they were older to get around it. It sucks, but most apps of a certain size and liability profile have to implement it this way.
Am I the only one who thinks the Carrie Fisher CGI looks pretty good? I appreciate the metaphor but my brain has no problem with the deepfake version of Leia.